Pact promises to exclude hundreds of Camarillo homes from flood zone

An agreement approved Tuesday for $17 million of work on Calleguas Creek ended years of efforts to forge a deal that will remove hundreds of Camarillo homeowners from a floodplain.

The end of the talks means the residents won't have to buy flood insurance, officials said this week.

"It's been a long time coming and tough negotiations," said Supervisor Kathy Long, who represents the area.

Long said talks began at least six years ago between negotiators for the county Watershed Protection District and Western Pacific Housing, a subsidiary of one of the nation's largest homebuilders, D.R. Horton.

Long and others attributed the delay to the price and complexity of the project as well as the downturn in the housing market. The project involves building levees on both sides of the creek and stabilizing the creek bottom.

The Board of Supervisors, in its capacity overseeing the watershed district, approved the agreement Tuesday after action taken by the developer. Construction is due to start Oct. 25 and possibly end by January 2013, district Director Norma Camacho told the board.

The district will cover $6 million of the cost from property taxes and the developer about $11 million, she said.

Camarillo Public Works Director Tom Fox said the deal provides relief not only for 250 homes in Horton's Village at the Park north of Pleasant Valley Road but also for 350 homes in established neighborhoods nearby.

"We couldn't be more delighted with the outcome," he said.

County officials say the number of homes is expected to reach close to 900, including units at the Lamplighter mobile home park and parcels slated for development.

Calleguas Creek starts in Simi Valley under the name Arroyo Simi and ends at the Mugu Lagoon, traversing heavily developed areas of the county. The hazard grew in the Camarillo area under updated flood maps issued a few years ago by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The agency had not updated the maps in decades, and the new ones put many more homes in the flood zone, where they must pay for flood insurance.

County Public Works Director Jeff Pratt said two factors accounted for the increase: updated rain records and development upstream. Structures, roads and driveways increase the risk of flooding because they cover ground that would absorb the flows.

Fox said homeowners pay $350 a year for flood insurance under a temporary reprieve from FEMA, but he expects that rate to go up to $1,100 in 2013.

Anyone who bought a home in the area in the past two years would have been told they were in the flood zone before the sale, he said. But people who bought homes before the remapping were not in the flood zone before the revisions.

"This project will get them out of the flood zone so they wouldn't have to pay insurance," he said.

Hydrologist Scott Holder said there haven't been major flooding issues on Calleguas Creek since 1983. The waterway did not flood heavily in the 2005 flood, largely because it was not hit by the huge storms affecting other areas of the county, he said.

Floods, though rare, are among the most damaging of all natural disasters.